Portia

I found the mountain lion in a trap on the eastern edge of my property in February of 1875.

A poacher’s trap: steel jaw, rusted, set in a deer run. She had been in it long enough that the leg was past saving. She was still alive. She was trying to tear herself free, which had been making things worse, and when I came close enough she went entirely still and looked at me with a look I recognized: not fear, exactly, but the assessment of something that knows it cannot escape and is deciding what to do with that information.

I had been making that same assessment for nine months.

I blood-bound her. I am not going to frame this as tenderness, or as rescue, because that is not what it was. I needed something that would not leave. I needed something whose nervous system I could depend on, something alive and present and warm in the particular way that living things are warm, attached to the world by the simple animal fact of its own pulse. I needed to be tethered to something, and the mountain lion in the trap was there, and I made the decision in about four seconds.

She was not pleased. A blood-bound mountain lion is still a mountain lion. She spent the first three months assessing whether she could kill me, and I spent those three months explaining, in various ways, that she could not, and then we arrived at something that operated like an arrangement.

Her name is Portia. I named her that. She has never confirmed whether it suits her.

She has been my primary emotional anchor for a hundred and fifty years. I say this not as a metaphor but as a description of operational fact. The Elder of Tucson has been held together, across the better part of two centuries, by a mountain lion who would still like, on certain evenings, to remove my head.

Some relationships are not beautiful. Some of them are simply what has kept you here.

She is asleep in my study as I write this. She breathes like distant machinery. The sound of it is the most reliable thing in the house.

I am grateful for the things that keep me here even when I would prefer otherwise. There have never been enough of them.

But there has always been one.

That has been enough.